> As for Udacity, which was founded in 2011, it gave the usual kinds of statements a company makes when it gets acquired by a much larger organization like Accenture. That is, it believes that it can reach more people and help them acquire skills as part of the larger entity. That goes without saying, but there had been rumors earlier this year that the company was in talks with Indian edtech company Upgrad with an asking price of $80 million. Apparently that deal fell through and Accenture ended up buying them instead.
I wouldn't be shocked if it was low. I remember during the online learning boom of the mid-to-late 2010s I spent some time studying a variety of courses on Udacity but I felt the depth wasn't there.
And now there's a lot of different options for online learning specialized to particular industries that are superior to general platforms like Udacity. For example, when I was learning DL, I joined a local study group that went through fast.ai together.
There's a disruption coming. One of the clearest LLM use cases is in learning and development. Another one is in producing "first drafts" of documents based on past work and "best practices". Both areas are what Accenture (and Deloitte, etc) excel at.
It's also a major disruptor for their business model: if the effort spent on "first drafts" and simple analysis is made automatically by LLMs, then you dont need as many juniors; your employee base gets smaller. But then how do you get experts if you hire fewer (better even) juniors? big consulting Cos are pyramids and these pyramids need feeding, continuously.
I think this is a brilliant move: Accenture has tons of capability in L&D that they've built up for their own purposes --feeding the pyramid. It's a capacity that they can easily offer to enterprises as an additional service, and they will probably use a lot of LLMs to deliver it. OTOH, this also gives them optionality in upskilling people (pushing them up the pyramid) while maybe having a narrower pyramid base because of the LLM disruption.
Expect Deloitte and the others to follow. It's too good a play.
I wouldn't be shocked if it was low. I remember during the online learning boom of the mid-to-late 2010s I spent some time studying a variety of courses on Udacity but I felt the depth wasn't there.
And now there's a lot of different options for online learning specialized to particular industries that are superior to general platforms like Udacity. For example, when I was learning DL, I joined a local study group that went through fast.ai together.